Category: Uncategorized

I have been writing movie reviews for 23 years now and have had a web page with reviews for 20 years. Often I will watch an old movie and write up a review, but at first I didn’t bother writing reviews of old movies. I started getting DVD’s from Netflix in 2006, and since I could only have 2 movies out at a time, I tried to watch a movie the day I got it and return it the next day. I was able to watch a movie almost every other day that way. I couldn’t keep that up all the time, so I would only join for a few months at a time. I watched a lot of movies that way. By the third time I joined they had started letting you watch movies online, but I still had dialup! Around that same time, I moved my movie reviews from static html web pages to a database that would generate web pages that I would then upload to my web server. A little later I started including the date I wrote the review which let me put the 10 most recent reviews on the home page, which I still do. But I didn’t try to add dates to the older reviews and after a movie fell off of the most recent ten, the date didn’t really matter much except to me and never appeared in the review. Lately I thought I probably should include the date in the review, just to give some sense of when I wrote it. I had dates going back to 2007, but the oldest reviews had been saved to text files from writing them on the Macintosh User Group. I started saving the reviews in 1998. I still have those text files and they often (but not always) include the date of the posting, so I was able to enter some of those.
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Last year I sold a bunch of silver and some gold coins back to Provident Metals, one of the dealers who had sold most of it to me. As spot prices rose, I sold off four batches of coins. I held onto most of the coins that I had paid a higher premium for, primarily coins from Australia and 5-ounce silver America the Beautiful quarters from the US. Last month I tried selling 5 of the ATB quarters on eBay and the selling prices weren’t great and eBay takes a big 12.5% commission, driving the realized gain down to around what the dealers would have paid. Plus with eBay you have to take pictures, write up an ad, package things up, etc. You can take coins to coin shops, but I feel like most of them would offer even less than the online dealers since they don’t handle the same volume.

One alternative was to try to sell on a forum of silver coin collectors. I found one that seemed okay, but you had to post four messages before you could sell anything there. There was no charge to post items for sale and a lot of the sellers insist on payment methods with no fees like Venmo, Zelle, or Paypal Friends and Family. It used to be you would get in trouble with PayPal if you had to many PPFF transactions, but they seem to have stopped that. However, you do lose any ability to dispute the sale and get your money back. In order to get around that, the forum set up feedback where if you buy an item from someone and everything turns out okay you both give each other positive feedback, similar to what eBay does, but unlike eBay the forum has no way of verifying that a transaction even happened. If you don’t have a feedback history then you are expected to pay or ship before the other person. If neither of you have a trading history, then you just have to figure out something, possibly going to a disputable PayPal transaction and paying 3% in commissions. I always keep a balance in my PayPal account so I can pay someone right away with those funds without a fee. But I think most people use a credit card to to fund PayPal purchases so there is a mandatory fee from the credit card company. PayPal can also transfer money from your bank account and wait for that to process, or process it immediately if you also have a credit card for backup. Zelle is nice because it eliminates PayPal and you just send money from one bank account to the other without revealing anything more than your email address or phone number and there is no wait involved.
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Last year when gold and silver prices jumped, I wound up selling almost all of my gold and a big chunk of my silver. But the buyback prices for some silver coins was not that great and I thought I could make more by selling them on eBay. Prices have fluctuated some since then, but are still pretty high. But the premiums dealers charge on silver have really, really gone up. It used to be you could get US silver coins for $3-5 over the spot price of silver and now it is more like $16 or $17 per ounce (the spot price is around $28 right now, so that is more than a 50% markup!).

The coins I wanted to sell are 5 ounce silver America the Beautiful quarters. They look just like quarters but are the size of drink coasters. I came in late, so didn’t get the early ones, then I paid anywhere from $90-$115 for each and got most of the states before the prices went crazy last year and I stopped buying. Now dealers are charging about $226 for a new one from the mint (the mint doesn’t sell these directly, just dealers), and still can’t keep them in stock, but the buyback price is only $153. That’s for $140 worth of silver. So the premium the dealer pays you is only $2 per ounce, while the premium they sell for is $17 per ounce. This is why it is hard to make money on silver. It would be better if you could do a private party sale and meet someone in the middle, but I don’t know any silver collectors and wouldn’t try Reddit or Craigslist for something like this (maybe a silver forum where buyers and sellers get ratings based on past transactions). I have put off selling on eBay because it is just a pain to take pictures, post listings, etc. Then you have to deal with people who may complain that the coins aren’t pristine or something and file a claim or want to return the coin. Also eBay isn’t cheap. Their current deal is they let you list items for free (if you do it their way), but you pay 12.5% of the sale price to them. That covers listing fees as well as finance fees from PayPal or credit cards.
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I started contributing to my Roth IRA in 2004 and have blogged about it frequently. It was a great way to park savings I wasn’t going to spend anyway and let it grow without ever paying taxes on the gains. Last year I retired and I still don’t need the money yet, so not only did I not take any money out, I figured I should continue contributing. Then I found out this week that IRA’s are only supposed to be funded with earned income and my pension and investment income is not considered earned. Of course I had contributed as soon as I could, which was January 4. The IRS is somewhat reasonable about this, but would charge a 6% penalty on any amount I contributed beyond what I was supposed to every year that I don’t correct it. So as long as I could reverse that contribution by the end of the year, I wouldn’t owe a penalty. I called Fidelity to see what I should do and how to take the money out. Long story short, people do this all of the time and there is an online form you can fill out. The wrinkle is if your contribution has increased in value, they have to return that to you as well, so since the market is up this year, instead of $7,000, they are returning $7,220. And I will have to pay taxes on that $220 as if it were income. That was a nice tax shelter and I will keep money in my Roth IRA account for as long as I can. One of Mom’s advisors said Roth money is the last money you should use, I guess because it is tax free.

As usual, I watched the Oscars this year. But this was a very, very different broadcast. First, not a great year for movies since a lot of movies were postponed with the theaters being closed most of the year. Second, again due to Covid but with things sort of opening safely, they couldn’t have the usual big Oscars, so they had it at a smaller venue with far fewer attendees, and some people at different places remotely (usually venues, not their houses, like some other award shows). That was nice that they could still dress up and be together even if it wasn’t at the Oscars. There seems to have been a pre-Oscars show with some music numbers, but there were no songs played through in the main broadcast and none performed live, since Quest Love acted as a house DJ. I feel like performing all of the nominated songs can be a bit of a time waster, especially when it isn’t a strong category (maybe they could do one or two if they are good). For some reason they also changed the order of the awards. I started recording the show before watching and maybe an hour after the broadcast started but before watching, I checked on Wikipedia to see who had won the early awards, thinking someone had vandalized the page by putting the director of Nomadland as the winner, since that is usually one of the last awards. Not this year. Director often goes to the same as Best Picture, but not always, so it kind of takes some suspense out early about Best Picture, but I do like that they spread out the awards. I still think Best Picture should have gone last instead of Best Actress and then Best Actor, which really backfired on them since Anthony Hopkins won the final award and he wasn’t there or online. So then it was just over.
Continue reading “2021 Oscars”